


And the Cold Earth Between Them

by leonidaslion



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Daddy Issues, F/M, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-18
Updated: 2011-10-18
Packaged: 2017-10-24 18:28:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/266539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leonidaslion/pseuds/leonidaslion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of John's death, Dean is searching for a way back to his father. He still can't decide whether he wants to hug him close or punch him, but Ellen's own special brand of mourning seems to be just what the doctor ordered. If Dean can't seem to shake his father's ghost during, well... He's done more screwed up things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the Cold Earth Between Them

**Author's Note:**

  * For [daria234](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=daria234).



Dean doesn’t know what he’s doing here. Truth be told, he isn’t even sure how he got here—which is a pretty damn terrifying realization, because the Roadhouse is over four hours from Sioux Falls.

He remembers not being able to sleep. He remembers slipping out of the room Bobby’s letting him and Sam sleep in ( _Sam fast asleep and snoring on the other twin bed_ ). He remembers going down to the yard and sitting behind the wheel of his car, staring out past the outer ring of decaying trucks and sedans at the charred patch of ground where his father’s funeral pyre burned.

And now he’s here, in the parking lot of a dusty bar miles away from the only family he has left.

This late—this early, probably—the bar is dark and quiet. This far out in the countryside, there are no florescent street lamps around to break apart the darkness. There are no sounds of passing cars to interrupt the ticking of his cooling engine. Overhead, stars burn indifferently—tiny, distant pinpricks of light—and as Dean runs his fingers over the worn indentations in the steering wheel, he finds himself remembering other nights, other quiet moments. There weren’t many, but there were enough that he feels the sting of Dad’s absence in the silence.

Dad dead, the Colt gone.

And Dean was on his way out before he unexpectedly woke up in that hospital bed. Sam was sure of that much, even if Dean himself doesn’t remember anything past Sam hauling him out of the Bobby’s cabin.

There are lines that Dean doesn’t want to draw between those three points of coincidence, but which he can’t help connecting. And Sam… Sam can’t help him with the comprehension he’s grappling against. Not after Dad’s final whispered command made Sam part of the problem.

Dean’s eyes sting but remain dry as his chest tightens with anger.

That son of a bitch. How the fuck could he die and leave Dean alone like this? More importantly, how the fuck could he have said that about Sam? Who leaves his kid with a parting, cryptic warning about his brother? Who trades himself for—

Dean shuts down on the thought before it can go anywhere, twisting his head to the side and staring out the window at the flat, dark line of scrubby grassland stretching off into the horizon. The clear night sky overhead gives the impression of being able to see farther than he thinks he should, the dry brush awash with eerie, silver light.

It’s a good night for hunting.

Something taps against the passenger side window and Dean jumps, fumbling for a gun even as he twists around to get a look at the source of the noise. He catches hold of himself almost immediately, although his heart is still pounding away inside his chest: it’s going to take a few minutes for the adrenaline flood to catch up to his brain. Aborting the search for a weapon ( _there’s a gun in the glove compartment, he’s remembering now, and he can feel a second tucked securely into the waistband of his jeans_ ), Dean leans across the empty seat to his right and starts rolling down the window. It would have been easier to open the door, but she might take that for an invitation and he doesn’t want her in the car.

Right now, he doesn’t even want Sam in the car.

Ellen seems to get that, and doesn’t even lean on the door once the window finishes retracting.

“Well,” she says by way of greeting, “If it isn’t Dean Winchester.”

Her voice is dry and carries the same husky edge Dean noticed eight days ago, when she was pointing the business end of the pistol in her hand—the pistol she must have used to tap on Dean’s window—at the back of Sam’s head. She’s wearing a flannel shirt that hasn’t been buttoned up right. Dean wonders in passing whether she sleeps in the nude and then wonders why the fuck his brain went there, out of all the possible thoughts he could have had.

“If this is how you welcome all your customers,” he says with a nod for her gun, “you might want to consider a different approach.”

He gets a wry twist of her lips for that comment, and then the gun disappears from sight as she does what he expected her to do before and leans one arm down on the open window. She isn’t quite in the car, and after a brief, defensive tense of Dean’s insides, he realizes that he doesn’t actually mind. With Ellen leaning down like that, the flannel shirt gapes at her neck. Dean’s eyes dip automatically, but there’s nothing to see except shadow.

“That what you are? A customer? Because if you’re looking for a beer, then you’re about three hours too late.”

Dean doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have an answer to give. But he doesn’t fidget the way he usually does when conversation runs dry, either, because there’s something inherently calming about meeting Ellen’s eyes. There’s something about the way her hair falls around her face in the moonlight.

Did Dad ever see her like this? Did he think she was beautiful?

No way, Dean told Sam when Sam asked. No way would Dad ever have been unfaithful to Mom—to her memory. Now, looking at the way Ellen’s hair seems silver in the moonlight, he isn’t so sure.

He gives his head a slight shake, confused by the wandering path of his thoughts, and shifts back over to his own side of the car.

“I, uh,” he says, feeling for the key where it sits in the ignition. “It’s late. I should get back.”

He gets his hand on the cool metal but doesn’t turn it. He still hasn’t turned it when Ellen asks, “Where’s that brother of yours? You misplace him, or did he get lost?”

“Sam’s fine.” Dean waits for the inevitable follow up— _and how’re you?_ —but it doesn’t come.

Instead, Ellen says, “Get your hand off the damn ignition and come inside.”

Dean is half out of the car with the key in his pocket before he realizes he intends to move. He hesitates there, one hand curled on the open door and the other gripping the roof. Ellen is striding back toward the Roadhouse, her gun in one hand and no shoes on her feet. The flannel shirt hits her mid-thigh over a pair of worn jeans.

She pauses in the Roadhouse’s open doorway, a lighter shadow against a void of black. Dean can’t tell whether she’s looking back at him or not. He thinks that it’s curiosity that goads him onward: some innate need to know whether her eyes are on him. What she sees when she looks at him.

He gets the rest of the way out of the car, then shuts the door behind him and crunches across the gravel. The hollow thumping of his boots against the wooden porch sounds abnormally loud when he mounts the single step up, but he resists the impulse to modulate his stride. Ellen wasn’t trying to keep her voice down when she was talking to him before, and anyone who slept through that isn’t going to wake up for a few footsteps.

Still, as he walks past her through the doorway, he asks, “Where’s Jo?”

“At a friend’s,” Ellen replies, and shuts the door again. Dean stands in the pitch-black bar and listens to her lock up behind them. He tracks her movements in the dark by the sound of her jeans whispering and doesn’t jump when she takes hold of his forearm. “Come on.”

Ellen can’t possibly see any better than Dean in here, but she moves them both through the bar’s negative space with the ease of familiarity. Dean expects to be dropped off at a stool while she turns on a light, but instead she keeps drawing him onward, until he’s questioning whether the Roadhouse was ever this big in the daylight. Then they round a corner and suddenly there’s the gleam of light spilling down into the hall from the top of a flight of stairs.

Dean’s heart picks up speed again in his chest.

Ellen drops his arm now that he can see, but doesn’t stop moving. She doesn’t bother to look back at him to see whether he’s following, either, and Dean guesses that he has his answer now, about whether she was watching him hesitate by the car. He doesn’t feel the slightest temptation to leave, though—not least because it would feel too much like turning tail, and Dean might be a lot of things, but he’s never run away before. Not from a woman.

He trails after her quietly, moving his gun from the front of his pants to the back and double-checking the safety while he’s at it. If he doesn’t remember arming himself with the weapon, he can’t trust that he took any precautions with it either. The gun feels fine, though—loaded but with the safety firmly latched. Reassured, Dean shrugs more comfortably into his leather jacket and climbs the stairs in Ellen’s wake.

The light turns out to be coming from an open door halfway down the upstairs hall. Dean slows as he nears it—this hall has photos and a carpet runner; it has the feel of a home rather than a place of business—and then steps up to the door just in time to see Ellen setting her canon of a gun down on the nightstand.

Dean lingers in the doorway, letting his gaze take in the black and white landscape photographs on the wall, and the picture of Jo on the dresser to the gun’s right. There’s a bookcase with only a few books but a whole mess of stone animal figurines. A door leading to a bathroom. An old armchair. A wooden hope chest. A bed.

Dean looks at the bed for a few moments before shifting his eyes back to Ellen. She’s watching him with a solid, level gaze which informs Dean that she caught him staring. Dean can’t tell from her expression how she feels about it.

He hasn’t felt awkward up until now, but suddenly there’s a clumsy, ungainly sensation in his chest. He doesn’t really want to know that she collects animal sculptures. It reminds him that she has a life separate from the understanding he’s gained of her. That the daydream he’s invented in his head might not have anything at all in common with the flesh and blood woman before him.

“Sorry I woke you up,” Dean says now. It’s useless noise, meant just to fill the quiet, but Ellen shrugs one shoulder as though he has offered up a meaningful contribution to a conversation they were having.

Lifting one hand, she drags her fingers through her hair while she says, “You didn’t. I can’t sleep right when Jo’s gone. I was just having a nightcap when I heard someone pull up outside.”

She turns from him and moves smoothly over to the nightstand, where Dean spots a bottle of Wild Turkey and a single shot glass. As Ellen uncaps the bottle and pours out a generous swallow, Dean’s gaze wanders around the room again. He’s more conscious, this time, of searching for something specific, even if he isn’t sure what that something is.

There’s something he expected to find here. Something he _needed_ to find, but isn’t seeing. The lack leaves him aching more fiercely than ever inside, and for no particular reason at all, he imagines Dad’s shade sitting downstairs in the dark: impression of a man and a time irrevocably past.

“You coming inside,” Ellen asks, distracting him from his thoughts, “or were you just going to stand on my doorstep until the sun turns us both into pumpkins?”

It’s the challenge in her tone that goads Dean into stepping over the threshold. There’s no electric thrill at being here, unless it’s the completely normal excitement he always feels when he first enters a woman’s bedroom. Reflex, surely, although he can’t help trying to see the curves of her body beneath the baggy flannel.

“Shut the door,” Ellen adds, and Dean backtracks with a confused flush heating his face. His hand lingers on the doorknob as he considers the dark hallway, and it takes deliberate consideration on his part to swing the door shut. When he turns back around, Ellen is holding a shot glass toward him; the bourbon bottle dangles easily from its neck in her other hand.

Dean accepts the shot glass Ellen hands him with a steady hand and shoots it back with his eyes on her. She’s watching his lips in between darting assessing glances lower—at his chest, at the rest of his body—and some of his confusion blurs into confidence. He smiles when he hands the glass back, making sure that their fingers brush.

If the careful gesture gives Ellen the tingling rush it’s meant to, she doesn’t show it.

“How about you take your coat off and stay a while,” Ellen suggests while she pours out a second shot for herself.

It’s a reasonable suggestion, and Dean shrugs his acquiescence before starting to pull the leather from his shoulders.

“Slower.”

He stops, stomach twisted with fluttering surprise. Despite the look he caught a moment before—despite his presence here in her bedroom—he didn’t actually expect their meeting to go this way. He looks a question at Ellen, who sits down on the bed and tosses back her shot.

Her expression still gives nothing away when she lowers the glass again, but as Dean continues to hesitate, she says, “John always said you knew how to take orders. Was he lying, or are you just too insecure to take direction from a woman?”

It’s clearly meant to sting and it does. It stings and, surprisingly, excites. Dad’s name rests between them like a live wire. Dad’s name, an invocation when spoken by this woman in this time and place, and Dean thinks that this is why he came. He thinks that he was summoned here for this: to bear witness to his father’s name on Ellen’s lips and give the mystic charm the raw, bloody need required to rouse John Winchester from his ashes and give him substance once again.

Dean’s fingers tremble slightly as he resumes sliding out of his coat, taking his time now and making it into as much of a show as he can. Ellen says nothing from where she’s watching him on the bed, but she doesn’t look away, and he takes that as an encouraging enough sign to keep going. He borrows a moment to set his coat and gun on the armchair and then shrugs out of his blue button-up as well. That he drops unceremoniously on the floor before taking hold of his t-shirt and pausing to wait again on a nod from Ellen.

He wants to be sure this is really happening. He wants to be sure this is real and not some weird, fatigue-induced misinterpretation.

Fuck, it’d be embarrassing if he turns out to be inventing these signals in his head.

But Ellen doesn’t make him wait long before obligingly ordering, “All of it.”

Dean’s too eager and nervous to go slow, and he has his shirt off and on the floor in a moment. His belt follows, and then there’s a brief delay while he takes care of his shoes and socks before he finally opens his pants and pushes both them and his boxers down to the floor.

When he straightens again, Ellen is looking at him with a wistful, sad expression that makes Dean think he isn’t the one she’s seeing there. It’s a staggering, terrifying thought and, for a brief instant, he understands how fucked up this is. He doesn’t know what a shrink would call the impulse that made him follow Ellen upstairs, but he knows it can’t be healthy, wanting to fuck someone just because his daddy did the same however many years ago.

 _Dad fucked her,_ he thinks. _Dad maybe even fucked her right in this room. Right in that bed._

The idea does something to Dean’s insides, and suddenly it’s like a switch has been thrown. Rage and despair flood him, screwing up his vision and making it difficult to see straight. Fury clogs his throat; aching loss burns his stomach.

The last time he felt like this, he took a tire iron to the Impala’s trunk.

Time lurches sideways on him, taking the room with it, and the next time he can get a solid grip on where he is and what he’s doing, he has Ellen pinned to the bed and is palming her cunt through the rough barrier of her jeans. His other hand is on her face, tilting her mouth up for him while he kisses her with bruising force—punishing force, maybe.

And Dean… Dean doesn’t do this with women. He doesn’t fuck them like this; he doesn’t let this side of himself out around them. Too worried they’d run screaming in the opposite direction, maybe. Too worried he wouldn’t be able to make himself stop.

He shudders, then pulls away from her. He rolls off of her body and slides away to sit on the edge of the bed—the only reason he doesn’t go further is that his thigh muscles are shaking and he isn’t sure they’d support him.

For a few minutes, the only sound in the room is their mingled, too sharp breathing.

Then Ellen says, “You trying to touch him or punch him?”

Dean’s face scrunches tight as his insides shift in disordered confusion. It’s like there are two warring factions inside of him: one that’s desperate to find a path back to Dad, even if the only traces left are the memories Dad left behind on the body of this woman he once fucked. The other faction, vicious and snarling, seethes with rage. The other faction wants to fuck this woman for the sole purpose of erasing Dad’s ( _unfaithful bastard_ ) hold on her: wants to fuck her hard enough to leave bruises deep enough and painful enough that whenever Ellen thinks the name Winchester, it’ll be Dean’s face she sees.

And yeah, there’s more than a little desire for punishment there. It takes two to tango, and she let John have her. She let him fuck her when John’s wife—when Dean’s _mother_ —was ash in the ground.

The anger boils in him, is briefly drowned out by Dean’s ravenous hunger for even the slightest illusion of Dad’s presence, and then froths higher again. Finally, both needs collapse into something almost even: a perplexed, hollow state that echoes in Dean’s voice as he answers, “I don’t—I don’t know what I’m doing here. I shouldn’t—I’m gonna go.”

He moves to rise, already looking for his clothes, but Ellen is faster. She’s up and kneeling behind him in an instant, one arm slung around his chest. Her hand is open, the palm resting over his heart. Her other hand grips his shoulder tightly.

“Fuck you if you do,” she whispers harshly. “Fuck you for coming here and offering me this and then running away like a goddamned coward.”

The words would wound if Dean weren’t so wound up inside. As it is, he just shuts his eyes and says, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You think I can’t take care of myself?” Ellen demands in return, and Dean doesn’t, not at all, because she might be good with a gun, but she isn’t going to be holding one when they get going. Then Ellen releases his arm and grips his throat instead, fingers digging unerringly into just the right pressure points to lock up his windpipe and dim his vision. Before Dean can startle into any sort of response, she eases up again and air flows right back into his lungs.

The message isn’t lost on him.

Dean coughs slightly and then turns, pushing off the floor and knocking Ellen back onto her ass. He’s on top of her before she’s stopped bouncing on the mattress, his own hand curled into place around her throat. He isn’t quite squeezing, but the threat is there and he knows he’s more than a little wild eyed. Somehow, though, she doesn’t look alarmed as she gazes up at him.

“Who is it you want to fuck, Ellen?” he demands, chest afire with fresh wrath and longing. “Me or him?”

“You know damn well who,” Ellen shoots back, and Dean does, but it still wounds his pride hearing the confirmation.

She didn’t invite him up here because he’s good looking and awesome in bed. She invited him up here because he’s his father’s son. It might as well be Sam with her right now; she wouldn’t care.

No. No, that’s not fair to Ellen, or to himself. She never looked at Sam the way she looked at Dean when he and Sam were here together. Dean picked up on it subconsciously then—the subtle, unmotherly approval when he side-stepped Jo’s warming interest—and he knows that, if it had been Sam come calling, Ellen would have handed him a mug of coffee and hugged him and then sent him on his way.

Then again, Sam spent four long years away. Sam has always fought against Dad’s training; he’s struggled with all of his might to stand on his own, out from the shade cast by Dad’s shadow. Dean’s done his best to force himself into the man’s mould: the results flawed and blurred, as in any copy, but close enough for government work.

It occurs to him abruptly that if they actually do this, Ellen will be making comparisons—she won’t be able to help herself—and some of the heat in his stomach curdles. He already knows which of them would come out ahead in her estimation—knows he won’t be able to measure up to his father in this matter, just like he’s never been able to measure up in any other.

But there are tears in Ellen’s eyes—not spilling out yet, but recognizable all the same—and Dean can’t turn his back on that. Nor can he deny that he wants to have her. In some resentful, wounded way, he needs to put his hands on the body that used to be Dad’s to touch and make it his own. He needs to take something back from Dad that he can have just for himself.

He just doesn’t know how to start.

Maybe she sees that uncertain hesitation in his face, because her own expression softens and she asks, “Would it help if I gave the orders?”

Dean’s startled by the strength of the jolt that runs through him at the suggestion. He doesn’t say anything, but Ellen’s sharp enough not to miss his shudder. She’s smart enough to identify it for the raw desire it is.

“Undress me,” she says.

Dean blinks, sure that they aren’t doing this—sure that _he_ isn’t doing this. His hand has loosened further around her throat, but he doesn’t move. He isn’t sure he remembers how.

“ _Undress me_ ,” Ellen repeats, this time with flakes of iron in her voice, and some tiny, aching tension at the center of Dean’s chest unfurls. His right hand opens, releasing her throat, as he shakes with something like relief. His left smoothes down her side, feeling the span of her ribcage where it descends to the soft plain of her stomach.

He finds the lower hem of her shirt and pushes it up where he can get at the zipper of her jeans—top button already undone, which makes it a cinch to open the denim up one-handed. There’s a moment of delay as he deliberates whether to obey to the letter or take some liberties, but it isn’t a long one. The temptation to feel is too strong, and he’s sure she won’t mind.

So instead of sliding Ellen’s jeans down her hips, he forces his hand inside the denim and pushes it between her legs. His knuckles scrape the stiff fabric; his fingertips and palm brush over her warm, bare skin—Ellen isn’t wearing any underwear. The realization sends heat racing through Dean’s body even before his questing fingers find her still wet from his rough handling earlier.

When he slips his fingers up and down her cunt, her eyelids flutter and she tilts her head back against the bed. Spreading her legs wider, she briefly pushes up into his hand before regaining control of herself and reaching down to grip his forearm.

“Enthusiasm’s appreciated,” she tells him breathlessly, “But I said undress, not finger. So unless you’re looking to be put in your place, you’d best get moving.”

Excitement shivers in Dean’s groin, and he almost wants to push her further. He doesn’t know what Ellen means by ‘putting him in his place’, but it sounds… interesting.

Not tonight, though. Tonight, he has simpler ends in mind. He has simpler needs to fulfill.

With one final caress, he eases his hand free. He’s grinning—he can feel the stiff stretch in his cheek muscles. The expression isn’t driven by any real happiness, but rather by something hot and excited and shifting. Whatever the emotion is, it deepens the ache in his chest to a throbbing pain with bladed edges.

The intensified sensation hurts—fuck does it ever—but it feels good too. It feels like this pain has always been there beneath the dull, heavier weight of grief, and needed some of Dean’s insides to be peeled back to find its release.

There’s similar pain in Ellen’s eyes, wrapped up in guilt and anger and lust, and it’s that kindred look more than any true surge of passion that bends Dean’s head lower and presses his mouth to hers. She allows the kiss for a moment—she opens for him, thrusts her tongue forward to meet his—and then grips his hair with one hand and jerks his head back to an awkward, slightly painful angle.

“Enough lollygagging, boy,” she tells him, and then adds, “Thought your daddy said you knew to follow orders.”

There it is again—the invocation of the spirit pressing them both together—and when Ellen releases his hair, Dean sits back up and reaches for her jeans obediently. They’re easy enough to peel down, her skin soft and scarred beneath his hands.

It occurs to him that he’s never bedded a hunter before, although he isn’t sure Ellen qualifies. _Did_ she hunt, once? Is that what these thin, whipcord marks on her right leg are? Or do they have some more mundane source?

He tosses her jeans off the side of the bed negligently and then kneels beside her, eyes fixed on the ridges of scar tissue running through her thigh and the meat of her calf. Ellen pushes up onto her elbows, allowing her legs to fall open slightly and revealing a shadowed glimpse of his goal, but Dean can’t shift his gaze. His breath comes hard and fast; his skin is flushed.

Did Dad see those scars? Did he bind them when they were fresh? Did he ask her about them?

A faint voice of reason in his head whispers that Ellen might take offense to his fascination—might take it the wrong way—but that worry is laid to rest as she says, “You want to touch them, be my guest.”

Dean licks his lips and then reaches out slowly, first skimming the pads of his fingers along the raised flesh and then pressing down harder.

“Did you hunt?” he asks in a voice that sounds strained and dry. “Did you hunt with him?”

“No,” Ellen answers, but it isn’t clear to which question, and Dean thinks—he’s sure that there’s a degree of pride in the way she carries these marks that indicates some valor in the earning.

Ellen lets him have his feel for several moments, then gently but firmly draws her leg away from his hands. When he glances up at her face, there’s hooded heat to her gaze.

“You gonna finish what you started?” she asks, and yes. Yes, Dean can’t think of anything else he wants to do more right now.

He shifts his weight forward, moving closer and crawling higher up her body so that he can kneel between her legs while he takes the flannel shirt in his hands and pops open the buttons. She lies still for him, and Dean can feel her eyes on his face, but his own attention is taken up by the body being slowly revealed beneath him.

Ellen has more marks on her belly—strange, shiny white lines that twist and bunch in odd ways. They aren’t claw marks or knife scars, or any kind of scar that Dean has seen before, and he pauses in his work again, fascinated, to rub his thumb along one of the lines, before realizing what they’re from.

He hasn’t ever slept with someone’s mother before.

But thinking about that side of Ellen makes him feel like this is even more fucked up than it already is. Sam doesn’t think Dean has a handle on anything academic, but Dean remembers that play well enough. Hard to forget when the plot involves a dude murdering his dad and then ending up married to his own mother and playing father to his half brothers and sisters.

For an instant, Dean’s interest in the proceedings wanes.

Then he reminds himself that Ellen _isn’t_ his mother, and whatever happened to Dad ( _you woke up healed and the Colt vanished, what the fuck do you think happened, asshole?_ ), it wasn’t Dean’s hand on the trigger. Dean didn’t ask for Dad to die; he didn’t ask for any of this. He’s just the one stuck living it.

Dean gets his fingers going again without—he hopes—a noticeable pause, smoothing the flannel out of the way as he goes. For an older woman, Ellen has kept herself up damn well—firm, flat belly leading up to breasts that are just the right size, as far as Dean is concerned, which is to say he can get his hand around one without feeling like he’s grasping at a nub or grappling with a mound. Perky nipples, too, he notes when he not-so-accidentally lingers while spreading her shirt wider. The caress of his fingers gets him a hitch of Ellen’s breath, and a rosy flush spreads over her bare skin—bared to the light for him, so he can see, and Dean can’t remember the last time a woman gave him this.

The women he usually takes to bed—with their hot, tight asses and their perfect make-up and hair—always want to turn the lights down low when he starts making moves for their clothes. Like Dean’s going to turn tail and run the instant he sees the slightest flaw. Ellen is the first woman who’s had the guts to meet his eyes in the bright, revealing light like this.

Her casual confidence is hot as hell, and for a moment Dean isn’t thinking about Dad. He isn’t thinking about the gaping hole inside him. All he knows is that there’s a woman beneath him, and he wants her. He wants her badly.

He undoes the last button with hasty, trembling fingers and pushes the shirt fully open. Then, sitting back on his heels, he gives himself a moment to take in the whole picture. Ellen is studying him right back: a frank, assessing stare that leaves Dean certain she’s comparing him with another memory in her head.

A masochistic, dark streak inside of him wants to ask how he stacks up, but he wrestles the impulse down deep inside of him where it belongs.

“What are you waiting for,” Ellen says finally, “An engraved invitation?”

“Just waiting on instructions, ma’am,” Dean answers, and a little shiver runs through Ellen’s body—impossible to hide that reaction when she’s lying there so openly for him.

Okay, yeah. Dean can spin with this.

“Use your mouth,” Ellen tells him in a husky purr, and the way she brings her legs up on either side of him and spreads her thighs leaves Dean with no doubts as to where she wants him.

Dean says, “Yes, ma’am,” just to see Ellen shiver again, and then slides his hands beneath her and tilts her lower body up. She helps him, leg muscles engaging to aid in the lift, which is a damned thoughtful thing to do, considering Dean was going to have to stain his forearms like hell to keep that position more than a few minutes.

When he leans down, he can smell her: something rich and earthy mixed in with that particular scent that all women have, once Dean gets them going. Her folds are still damp from his earlier fingering, and as he takes in the view—clit just there, begging for attention—it hits him anew that Dad was here. Dad was maybe right here in this very spot, kneeling down between Ellen’s legs and getting ready to service her.

The thought twists in Dean’s chest and stomach, both comforting and exciting, and carrying only the slightest edge of instinctive disgust. A guy can only clean up someone else’s vomit so many times before he has to admit to himself, even if only in the recesses of his own mind, that the boyhood god isn’t divine at all, but mortal. Mortal and harboring human desires like anyone else. Sure, Dad’s desires usually involved alcohol or blood, but Dean finds that he isn’t as shocked as he thinks he should be at the prospect of Dad with a woman.

The impact of his realization fades almost immediately, of course, leaving Dean alone in this room with Ellen, and the loss stings. He chases after his father’s retreating presence the only way he can, by nosing his way between Ellen’s thighs and getting his mouth on her. She tenses and gasps at the first eager slip of his tongue between her folds, then gives a stronger shake as he licks again while nuzzling against her clit.

Did she sound like this for Dad? Did she shiver quite so helplessly? Probably. Dad never did a half-assed job at anything he’d set his hand to. Probably he excelled at this, the same way he excelled at everything else. But although Dean is sure the comparison going on in Ellen’s head isn’t exactly in his favor, he’s determined to put on the best showing he can.

Taking a firmer grip on Ellen’s ass, he sets his mouth to work, borrowing all of the tricks he’s learned over the years. It helps that Ellen doesn’t try to hide her tells any more than she tried to hide her body—when he adds a playful nip between licks and her lower body jerks on a breathless moan, he knows to try it again. He knows that she likes it a little rough—or at least wants it that way tonight.

As he works, thrusting his tongue into her as deeply as he can before briefly pulling back to suck directly on her clit, Dean finds that he wants this rough too. His internal temperature has undergone another of those sudden spikes, leaving him furious and violence lashed. Mostly, it’s Dad he’s pissed at—Dad for being here before him, for betraying Mom, for betraying _him_.

He died. Dad _died_ and left Dean in this on his own. That son of a bitch.

The urge to really bite down seizes him, strong enough that he can practically taste copper in his mouth. But it isn’t Ellen’s fault ( _yes it is; it takes two to fuck, who does Dean think he’s fooling?_ ) and he doesn’t really want to hurt her. With a gasp of his own, he lifts his head and drops her lower body back down onto the bed.

Before Ellen can protest, Dean has crawled up the length of her body and blanketed her mouth with his. Most girls don’t want to be kissed after he’s gone down on them—squeamish, they twist their heads to the side and push at his shoulders with a nervous tittering laugh. Ellen either doesn’t give a fuck or knows he needs this, because she opens up and kisses back, bringing enough roughness of her own into the kiss that Dean gets he doesn’t have to hold back.

With a growl, he shoves down on her, the pressure of his mouth forcing her head back down into the pillow. He grips her face with his hands, holding her still as he twists his head further sideways to force the kiss deeper. There’s blood between them—his or hers or both, Dean isn’t thinking clearly enough to know.

There isn’t really any space between them, but Ellen finds the room to squirm one hand between them to grip Dean’s cock. His heart lurches into overdrive and his mouth falters as she jacks him, giving a particularly rough twist as her hand slips up over the crown.

Breaking the kiss, Dean groans, “ _Fuck_.”

Ellen chuckles, sounding far more in control than she has any right to be, and then bites on his earlobe. Her hand moves on his cock again, with just the right amount of force and pressure, and Dean shuts his eyes and bites down on his lower lip—gets a too sharp sting in return, which means it was already cut, but what the fuck ever. He can’t find it in him to give a shit just how much he gets marked up tonight. Not with Ellen drawing off of his ear so slowly, with talented twists of her tongue along the lobe that send shivers racing through Dean’s body.

“Tell me you’ve got condoms,” Ellen murmurs, although one of her legs comes up and wraps over his, pinning his body tightly against hers.

Dean does, but they’re way over in his pants on the floor, and he really doesn’t want to move from where he is. Fuck, he can feel how wet she is down there—wet and loose after he worked her—and all he has to do is shift down slightly and thrust forward, and—

Ellen twists Dean’s hair with her left hand—snuck that hold on him when his upstairs brain took a decidedly downstairs turn—and Dean hisses at the sudden, sharp pain.

“You can get yourself a condom, or you can get the hell out,” Ellen says, with a chill to her voice that tells Dean he isn’t the only one who’s angry. He isn’t the only one hating ( _hating? really?_ ) Dad here. He isn’t the only one looking for a little posthumous punishment.

Somehow, that awareness allows him to slip the anger’s hold. Some measure of calm and rationally return—enough for him to realize that he’s a couple heartbeats from crying, and he doesn’t think he could ever look himself in the mirror if he broke down now. The only saving grace of the moment is that Ellen doesn’t look all that steady herself when he shakes her hand off and looks down.

And there’s a guilty, pained cast to her eyes that makes him rethink his earlier assessment. Ellen might not know it, but it isn’t Dad she’s pissed at. Not really.

It’s terrifying to think that Dean might be misjudging his own fury as well.

That isn’t anything he wants to think about tonight, though—not when he’s so close to losing himself in another warm body—and he casts his mind away from it as he pushes up, sliding free from her hold and then climbing off the bed. She sits up to watch him, careless with her own nudity and the fact that sitting up has left her seemingly perfect stomach with a slight paunch. Her breasts sag lower than Dean is used to; there are lines around her eyes and reddened, puffy mouth.

Her confidence makes her not just beautiful, but breathtaking, though, and as he sneaks glances back at her, Dean feels a tug in his chest that has nothing to do with Dad. A tug that’s just between him and the woman on the bed, here in this moment when they need each other desperately. A tug that’s strong enough to make him second-guess his purposes for being here.

Maybe this isn’t such a great idea.

As though she can sense the tenor of his thoughts ( _or maybe Dean’s face is more expressive than he means it to be_ ), Ellen tilts her head back in challenge and says, “You’re not pussying out on me, are you?”

Yeah, like Dean can duck out _now_.

He flashes her one of his patented cocky smiles as he crouches and feels through his jeans for his wallet. There’s a couple of condoms there, and he pulls one out and quickly tears the packet open with his teeth. His fingers are a little shaky as he works the rubber on, but not so bad that he can’t make a little show of it, or give himself a couple of jerks to rev the engines higher.

“No.” Ellen’s sharp command stops him mid-stride as he starts back for the bed, and as he hesitates, she gives him a hard smile and adds, “On your knees.”

Dean thought they were past power plays—thought he was past them, anyway—but the command sends an unexpectedly strong surge of arousal through his body. And there’s a degree of comfort to the thought of following someone else’s orders tonight, when he can’t trust himself and doesn’t really want to be making any decisions. He takes a moment anyway, letting his eyes tell her that this is something he’s giving her—she has a wolf on her leash, not a tamed beagle—and then, slowly and as gracefully as he can, sinks down.

On his knees, he looks up at her solidly, waiting as she slides herself to the bottom of the bed and lets her legs hang over, thighs spread so that he has a good look at the place he’s so desperate to bury himself. Then, with a shake of her head that jostles the open flannel shirt lower on her shoulders and makes her breasts jiggle enticingly, she says, “I don’t think I ever gave you permission to stop what you were doing.”

In case Dean doesn’t remember ( _fat chance_ ), she slips a hand between her legs and rubs her fingers over her pussy and clit.

“Sorry,” Dean says, although he’s aware that he sounds about as apologetic as he feels, which is not at all.

The arch of Ellen’s eyebrow tells him that his rebelliousness has been noted, but she doesn’t comment on it as she asks, “Don’t you think you’d better finish?”

Yeah, Dean does. He’ll finish, and he’ll make her forget she ever touched another Winchester. He’ll banish the shadow that’s been layered over his heart for weeks.

With a smirk, he moves forward in a crawl designed to show his body off to its best advantage. He keeps his head up as he comes, and sees from the gleam of Ellen’s eyes and the shallowing of her breaths that he’s succeeding.

Dean crawls in close between her legs, then sits back on his heels and runs his hands up the inside of her calves. He caresses her knees before reaching higher, and finally closes his hands around her upper thighs so that he can jerk her closer to the bed’s edge. From here, he has a decent height and angle, and only has to bow his head a little as he leans in, burying his face against her pussy.

He’s gentler this time—teasing. He rouses her with slow, light licks and tentative thrusts of his tongue, bumping her clit with his nose only occasionally. When he has found a rhythm and worked Ellen into it along with him—her moans keep time for him, and the powerful rolls of her body—he shifts his focus with an abrupt motion, closing his mouth over her clit and sucking roughly while he rubs the tip of his tongue back and forth over the nub.

Ellen grabs the back of his head and cries out—a husky, low sound that goes right to Dean’s cock. He sucks harder, the pressure of his tongue increasing, and feels her shake as she comes on his mouth, juices running down to slick his chin. She must be extra sensitive afterward—most women are, in Dean’s experience—but he doesn’t let up. Instead, he shifts lower again and starts thrusting his tongue in and out of her while jerking his head in short motions that rub his nose against her clit with hard, near-continuous friction.

“Jesus,” Ellen chokes as her thighs shake wildly. Her hand tightens as best as it can on his hair and she moves with him, pushing forward in tiny pulses that coincide with the thrusts of his tongue.

It isn’t until she has come for a second time with another obvious cry that she uses that hold to pull his head back.

Dean goes reluctantly, then meets her eyes as he licks his lips and chin as best as he can. Her entire body is flushed; her eyes dark. Her smell is thick in Dean’s nose, maddening and strong. His condom-covered cock juts between his legs, untouched in what feels like hours but still achingly hard.

“Christ, you’re good at that,” Ellen says breathlessly, and Dean’s chest glows in a messy, confused way at the praise.

She said that with surprise, like Dad wasn’t. And maybe it’s a fucked up thing to be proud of, that he’s better at eating a woman out than his father, but right now it’s all Dean has. In the next instant, of course, guilt and loss choke him—an unexpected agony he keeps off his face mostly by virtue of being too surprised by their return to show it.

Or maybe doesn’t keep from his face quite so well, because although Ellen’s eyes don’t lose any of their passion, they do soften slightly. She strokes the hand not gripping Dean’s hair over his cheek, fondly if not lovingly, and then says, “I want you to fuck me now. Rough as you like, and don’t you dare worry about whether I can take it or not.”

Dean’s past burying himself in anger, though. Oh, he’s sure the fury will return again and again before it’s finally done with him, but for tonight that’s over with. His grief’s homecoming is too prominent, settled into his chest and over his back with the chilling, aching weight of loose dirt from a grave. He follows as Ellen scoots backwards, crawling onto the bed again and then finding his place over her. She rests her head against a pillow, lifting one leg and hooking it over his ass to draw him closer.

Dean can’t look at her as he pushes in. He buries his face against the pillow instead, stray strands of her hair in his mouth. She’s loose and ready for him after her orgasms, and welcoming, and he shudders once as he thrusts into her clenching, wet heat. There’s a numbing distance between them—the damn condom getting in the way—but it isn’t so bad that Dean’s libido doesn’t go into overdrive at the way her pussy constricts around his cock.

“That’s it,” Ellen says breathlessly, one hand splayed over his shoulder blade. “That’s it, come on.”

Dean does, drawing out halfway in order to push in again, and Ellen moans beneath him.

 _Dad was here,_ Dean thinks. Despite his earlier fixation with the idea, the thought hits him in an abrupt, disjointed way, and Dean feels the first hot tear slip past his defenses. He rubs his face roughly against the pillow as he thrusts again, fighting to focus on his body and raise his guard back up where it should be. He’s too raw inside to manage it—too tender and hurt. He can keep the rest of the tears inside where they belong and his cock hard and that’s about it.

But there’s still a measure of comfort in burying himself in the woman beneath him—this beautiful, confident woman, who’s mourning Dad as well in her own way, and has shown Dean a special kind of understanding in offering this.

Dean’s thrusts pick up pace as he rounds his back, twisting down so that he can get his mouth on Ellen’s right breast. Her nipple is already erect when he finds it, but her gasp as he suckles and flicks at the nub with his tongue are gratifying. He surges into her more strongly, balancing on one hand for leverage while using his other to work the nipple he can’t reach with his mouth right now.

“Dean,” she says, clutching his shoulder with one hand while bucking up against him. “Christ, _Dean_.”

Her voice is too thick—sounds like she’s crying—and suddenly Dean’s all too aware that Dad is between them. Dad’s ghost is cold and cloying in the room, using up all the air and draining the warmth from Dean’s body. He squeezes his eyes more tightly shut and throws himself into performing, driving his body to orgasm by sheer, unrelenting will.

His climax catches him by surprise, actually, and he jerks his head from Ellen’s breast to utter a sharp, hurt cry while snapping his hips forward in the only rough thrust he’s used. Ellen moans—maybe coming again, maybe not; Dean’s chest and head are too messed up for him to care right now.

Dean continues to strain forward as he rides the strangely subdued waves of pleasure and then collapses heavily against Ellen, forehead pressed to her shoulder. The leg she had hooked over him slides down, rubbing along his thigh and calf on its way. Her hand trails up and down his back in a caress that says she knows he’s crying, no matter how still and tight he’s keeping his body.

It’s more comfort than Dean wants—he hates the confirmation that she knows what he’s doing; it leaves him feeling exposed—so he pulls out of her and rolls off, lying on his side facing the door. The wall to the door’s left bears a single photograph: Ellen and a bearded man and a tiny, tow-headed girl who can only be Jo. She looks to be about four in the picture, and is grinning with all the enthusiasm of someone too naïve to know the world has teeth of its own.

Dean stares at the photo—stares at the man in particular—and lets the tears come the way they want to. He’s confident that Ellen won’t bother him until he’s ready. After all, she must have her own feelings to work through right now.

It’s long minutes before Dean’s tears slow. He feels drained after, empty and sore. When he’s sure he has the waterworks back under control, he lifts a hand to rub at his face and rid himself of the worst of the evidence.

That’s when Ellen says from behind him, “Three times, but never here.”

Dean doesn’t have to ask what she means.

He wishes he didn’t know what she means.

Finally, after another minute of stilted silence, a prickling streak of masochism makes him ask, “Why not?”

“My husband likely would have minded.”

Married. Of course she was married. She’s got a daughter. Dean’s been staring at her husband for the last however many minutes. It just never occurred to him to think about her being married and her fucking Dad as co-existing events on the same timeline.

As he lies there quietly, trying to absorb the information, Ellen continues, “I don’t even know why the hell I did it. I loved Bill. I was happy with him, we weren’t having any troubles. And there was Jo. But your daddy, he had this way about him…”

She trails off, and although Dean knows she isn’t waiting on a response from him, he clears his throat and rasps, “Yeah.”

Because he knows what she means. Christ, it isn’t like Dean didn’t try to get away a hundred times, although Sam would call him a liar if he ever claimed so aloud. But Dean did try. He just… he wasn’t ever strong enough to escape Dad’s magnetic pull.

“He and Bill was hunting together when Bill died,” Ellen says.

It’s such an unexpected statement—attack, really—that it strikes Dean breathless, but of course Ellen isn’t done.

“I never was sure, when he came to tell me, whether he let it happen. If he wanted Bill out of the way.”

Fuck. Dean shuts his eyes on the sudden surge of anger and guilt and grief that swells in his throat.

“Why—” he starts, and then has to clear his throat before he can continue, “Why the fuck would you tell me that?”

Ellen shifts on the bed behind him. “I don’t know,” she says. She doesn’t sound hostile or angry, the way he expected her to. Mostly, she just sounds tired. “Maybe I thought you deserved to know. Maybe I just needed to tell someone who knew him. I don’t know.” There’s a pause where Dean struggles to find something to say, and then Ellen offers, “You can clean up in the bathroom before you go.”

Right. Because Dean has served his purpose, and now he needs to get out of her hair so she doesn’t have to look at him and think about what she did. Think about what Dean’s dad may or may not have let happen.

Dad’s dead and he’s still taking from Dean. He’s taking and taking and taking, and Dean just doesn’t know what’s going to happen when Dad has everything and there’s nothing left.

Wordlessly, he rolls out of the bed and walks over to the bathroom, collecting his clothing as he goes. He shuts the door behind him, then stands there for a moment looking at the toothbrush holder and floss and liquid soap dispenser on the sink. There are two more of those little stone animals in here on top of the toilet—a green otter and a pink sea turtle.

Dean’s eyes keep going back to the figurines as he flushes the condom and finds a facecloth to wash his face. He wonders why Ellen started buying them, and if there’s a story behind them, and why she bothered bringing Dean upstairs at all. She could have fucked him down in the darkened bar. They could have used one of the guest rooms if she was worried about being interrupted by Ash.

She brought him up here, though. She brought Dean into her room and let him get a look at a softer, more girlish side to her personality that would be bad for business if it got out. With a couple notable exceptions, hunters don’t tend to take woman seriously as a whole. Collecting pink sea turtle figurines? That’s going to leave Ellen with one heck of an intimidation problem.

Why the hell would she let Dean see that?

Dean is still wrestling with comprehension as he dresses, and his understanding of the situation isn’t helped by the lingering ache of loss in his chest. Despite Ellen’s sudden coldness—despite the truth and suspicions she flung in his face a few minutes ago—his mind keeps going back to that moment of connection between them when he was fishing for condoms. He keeps looking back at the figurines on her toilet.

When he opens the door and steps back out into Ellen’s room, he’s no closer to knowing what he’s doing than he was when he came in here, but he knows he can’t leave it like this. He has to say _something_ , damn it.

Ellen has rebuttoned the flannel shirt, and is sitting cross-legged up in the bed and pouring herself a shot. She doesn’t look at Dean as he leaves the bathroom, and he stops awkwardly in the middle of her bedroom, waiting to be acknowledged.

“Thanks for a lovely time,” she says finally without lifting her eyes. He watches her lean over and set the bottle back on the nightstand, then take her shot.

“I want to see you again,” he says. The words tumble out rapidly, before he’s even aware he means to speak, and the sentiment is perplexing ( _does he want to see her again? does he really?_ ) but he doesn’t take it back.

Fucked up and unexpected as the concept might be, he must mean it.

“That’s maybe not so good an idea.”

Dean doesn’t ask why not. He knows why not. He can still feel Dad in the room, hovering insubstantially but inexorably between them.

“Besides,” Ellen adds with a sigh, “You want to explain to Sam why you’re fucking someone old enough to be your mama? You want to explain to Jo why you’re fucking me and not her?”

Those seem more like excuses than anything else to Dean, though. They aren’t Ellen’s real reason. They aren’t even close.

Dean stands where he is, searching for a way to articulate what he’s thinking and feeling when he can’t even put a name to it, and Ellen sighs as she finally looks up at him.

“This was a mistake, Dean. It was nice, but it was a mistake.” She slides to the edge of the bed and stands, then immediately bends over to retrieve her jeans. “I’ll walk you to your car.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

The sun is just tipping over the horizon when Dean steps out onto the Roadhouse’s front porch. It’s still early enough in its rise that the world is more washed out than not: stuck in a colorless, pale tint that will blossom with rosy pink and glimmering orange in just a few minutes. There’s a little bit of birdsong, heralding the coming dawn, but mostly it’s quiet.

Ellen trails him off the porch and down onto the gravel. The tiny stones must stick into the soles of her feet, but if it hurts, she doesn’t complain. Dean isn’t going to make it back to Sam before Sam wakes up, but he might be early enough to pretend to have gone for coffee and doughnuts, if he plays his cards right. If he can think of a way to explain his split lower lip.

“This yours?” Ellen asks unexpectedly as Dean moves around the hood toward the driver’s side. He looks over the Impala’s roof to find Ellen striding down the length of the car with an appraising eye.

Dean doesn’t answer—mostly because he gets that she already knows—but he does tense when Ellen rounds the car at the far end and pauses, hands out of sight but surely feeling their way across the pitted and ruined trunk. Now she’ll ask about the damage and he’ll lie, he’ll tell her it was from the accident; he’s been piecing the car back together from a useless heap of scrap metal, hasn’t had time to bother yet about a few minor gashes on her caboose.

But Ellen doesn’t ask. She finishes coming around the car and walks up to him. There’s a little more color in the world now, enough that he can see pinks and oranges gathering in her hair. She touches his face lightly with her fingertips, and doesn’t move away when he bends down to kiss her. But when his hand tries to close on her waist, she turns her head to the side and backs up.

“Goodbye, Dean.”

Half of Dean accepts that for the dismissal it clearly is. The other half tells him to go after her, and catch her face between two hands, and hold her still for a deeper, slower kiss. One that will convince her he’s not just some infatuated kid—or not just, anyway.

After a moment, he turns without a word and lets himself into the car.

He doesn’t look at her as he backs up and pulls away. Doesn’t watch the Roadhouse dwindle and vanish into his rearview. He just fingers the pink sea turtle’s smooth shell in his pocket, and wonders how long it’ll take her to realize it’s gone.

And whether she’ll hunt him down to get it back.


End file.
